scarus

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A Mediterranean food fish (Sparisoma scarus) of excellent quality and highly valued by the Romans; -- called also parrot fish.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A fish of the genus Scarus.

n. [capitalized] [NL. (Gronovius, 1763; Forskål, 1775).] A genus of acanthopterygian fishes, of which the scarus of the ancient Greeks and Romans is the oldest known species, giving name to the Scaridæ or Scarinæ, and having varying limits; the parrot-wrasses or parrot-fishes.

Etymologies

Latin. See scar ("a kind of fish"). (Wiktionary)

Examples

Of all fishes the so-called scarus, or parrot, wrasse, is the only one known to chew the cud like a quadruped.

The grey mullet feeds on mud, the dascyllus on mud and offal, the scarus or parrot-fish and the melanurus on sea-weed, the saupe on offal and sea-weed; the saupe feeds also on zostera, and is the only fish that is captured with a gourd.

In the lagoon no scarus is found, nor thritta, nor any other species of the spiny fish, no spotted dogfish, no spiny dogfish, no sea-crawfish, no octopus either of the common or the musky kinds, and certain other fish are also absent; but of fish that are found in the lagoon the white gudgeon is not a marine fish.

The fisherman baited his hook with a piece from the belly of a scarus and lowered it down out of sight, then he belayed the line to a thole pin, and, sitting in the bottom of the boat, hung his head over the side and gazed deep down into the water.

Globeshaped jelly-fish as big as oranges, great cuttlefish bones flat and shining and white, shark's teeth, spines of echini; sometimes a dead scarus fish, its stomach distended with bits of coral on which it had been feeding; crabs, sea urchins, sea-weeds of strange colour and shape; star-fish, some tiny and of the colour of cayenne pepper, some huge and pale.

Without transforming bodily a Roman caena into an English dinner, one may sometimes effect with advantage a trifling change in the less important dishes: a boar must not appear as a baron of beef, but a scarus may perhaps be turned, as I have turned it, into